Ian Sansom
Ireland’s Lost Generation
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets
By Clair Wills
Clair Wills is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and the author of a number of monumental books about Irish culture and history, including That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (2007). Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets is not only her most personal book, but also perhaps the most personal book ever written by a Regius professor at Cambridge. It combines scholarly rigour with memoir and a not inconsiderable amount of righteous anger to chronicle the silences and secrets that governed lives in 20th-century Ireland.
‘I think of history’, writes Wills at the beginning of the book, ‘as a long line of bodies, stretching back through time.’ The bodies she concentrates on are those of her grandmother Molly, Molly’s son Jackie, his lover Lily, and their child Mary. ‘It is an all-too-familiar story of desire, sex, illegitimate birth, institutionalization and emigration,’ writes Wills. ‘And it happened in part because of the actions of my uncle – who got his lover pregnant and disappeared to England, abandoning her and her child to a mother-and-baby home and an orphanage. And because of my grandmother – who didn’t say no.’
For keen readers of Irish memoir and autobiography, many of the details here will be completely familiar yet utterly shocking: the challenges of rural life, the indignities faced by immigrants in London, and the horrible facts about the state- and Church-sponsored homes, orphanages, adoption agencies and schools that were established
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.
Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk